Migration planning and operations for data storage systems involve coordination of a significant amount of asset reconfiguration/configuration activities and configuration migrations. Event windows used in migration planning include a collection of migration events in a particular time frame and using particular assets. An event window can contain multiple point in time snapshots. A “snapshot” is a representation of a state of a system at a particular point in time.
The use of event windows and snapshots in migration planning operations facilitates the planning of a data storage system as the system goes through different states during a set of configuration changes. It is to be understood that a data storage system may be part of a datacenter. Event windows and snapshots allow an administrator of the datacenter to plan updates to the configuration of the data storage system at multiple points in time. The ability to simulate a change to a representation of the datacenter (or data storage center) is referred to as modeling, while actually implementing a change to the datacenter is referred to as migration. For example, an administrator can model what a datacenter would look like given a proposed change to certain resources of the datacenter, while the actual implementation of the resource change would be considered a migration.
When planning a migration, known processes for making configuration changes typically require a user to wait until a new element is delivered before starting configuration changes, resulting in increased time on site completing configuration changes, an increased number of unplanned configuration changes, and a high risk of unexpected configuration changes.
Accordingly, there is a need for improvement of the known processes for configuration changes, when new configuration elements are added.